Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella departs following a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Sept. 4, 2025.
Eric Lee | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft was hit with outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company’s scheduled earnings release.
Users on social media reported problems accessing their sites and services running on Microsoft’s products, and the company’s website was down. The problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which relies on user reports.
Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company acknowledged the issues on its Azure and 365 support accounts on X.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services,” the Azure support account said. “Customers may experience issues when accessing services. Updates are provided via the Azure status.”
The latest update on Azure’s status page says that issues began with Azure Front Door (AFD) at about noon ET, “resulting in a loss of availability of some services.” The company said it suspects an “inadvertent configuration change” was the trigger and that it’s “rolling back to our last known good state” for AFD services.
“We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update,” the company wrote.
Microsoft’s 365 status account wrote, that its services are “experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage.”
The service disruptions come a little over a week after larger rival Amazon Web Services reported a major outage that took down numerous websites. Throughout the day on Oct. 20, AWS said it observed “increased error rates” for customers when trying to launch new instances in EC2, its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.
AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market as of the first quarter, according to Canalys. Azure is second at 23%, followed by Google’s cloud unit at 10%. Azure and Google Cloud have been growing faster of late, driven by a boom in artificial intelligence workloads.
All three companies are set to report quarterly results this week, starting with Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday after the bell. Amazon reports on Thursday.
In March, Microsoft suffered an outage over a weekend that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.
